
As a writer of historical fiction, nothing delights me more than scholarly battles. I particularly enjoy the decades-old controversies that leave me free to pick whichever side adds drama to my story: I can feel confident that nothing will be settled before I’m dead and someone else has to write a new forward to my novel.
I came across one such conflict recently when I was looking for particularly ancient Jewish aphorisms — any that might have been in general circulation during the Exodus, which is the setting for my books. It turns out that a pretty big section of Proverbs, called “Mishlei” in Hebrew, may have been cribbed from an ancient text known as “The Teaching of Amen-en-apt” or “The Instruction of Amenemope.” This set of saws from a bygone millennium seems to have been written by an Egyptian scribe during the reign of pharaohs who took the name of Ramses.
Or, some scholars say, the literary appropriation may have happened the other way around, and Mishlei should get the copyright.
Last month, I wrote about parallels between the Book of Genesis and the Vedas of India; I’ve also posted on the question of whether monotheism was taught to the Israelites in Egypt (where the pharaoh Amenhotep I was, wait for it, circumcised — a fact that I am still not over), or whether the idea of worshiping a single god went in the opposite direction, and Amenhotep’s later successor Akhenaten got the idea from a Jewish medical practitioner who freed him of his foreskin. As a writer of fiction without a dog in the academic fight over which came first, the Jewish chicken or the Egyptian egg, I can play in the sandbox of cultural relationships amid an ever more solid sense of the close ties between ancient forms of Judaism and neighboring religions.

But as I write in the first-person voices of my protagonists, who are Israelites, I need to be highly sensitive to what they would perceive as differences between themselves and the majority Egyptians who surrounded them. For instance, I can have one of them decide to turn a goose into an eagle, either for reasons of poetic elegance or as a marker of their image of the divine:
(Amenemope, ch. 7): “Toil not after riches; If stolen goods are brought to thee, they remain not over night with thee. They have made themselves wings like geese. And have flown into the heavens.”
(Proverbs 23:4–5): “Toil not to become rich, And cease from dishonest gain; For wealth maketh to itself wings, Like an eagle that flieth heavenwards.” (Wikipedia)
At the present moment, when all anyone seems to want to see are cultural differences, it’s worth indulging in the practice of taking a good idea from wherever it comes — as well as considering how much of our own attitudes are carved from what we think of as bedrock, but is in reality as soft as sandstone.
Other spices from afar. Last month’s post was about cinnamon and pepper from the southern reaches of India appearing in ancient tombs and jars in Egypt and modern-day Haifa. Another spice traveling a long distance, albeit not quite as far, was frankincense.
The resin of this tree from the torchwood family came to the Levant from southern Arabia and was used more for its medicinal rather than its culinary properties. Today we associate it with the Three Wise Men who brought it, along with myrrh and gold, to the baby Jesus. But it was used by the Egyptians in their embalming process, i.e., at the other end of life from birth.
That information ended up being useful to me by emphasizing the specific and well-traveled trade routes that crisscrossed the ancient world as effectively as our interstate highway system. One of my protagonists is the widow of a caravan owner; her life was both circumscribed by the Code of Hammurabi and blown open by the spice trade, much like the contrast between Dorothy’s Kansas home and the lifestyle of the itinerant fortune-teller Professor Marvel from The Wizard of Oz movie.
My wishful sense is that the appearance of all of these exotic products in the tombs or homes of the ancients means that their owners valued diversity, variety, and dissimilarity to the everyday. Today, with both exploitation of labor and ease of transportation being cheapening factors, we think of goods from China or Vietnam as pedestrian and are willing to pay a premium for local manufacture. The opposite, of course, was true throughout most of human history: Frankincense, hand-derived from far-off cliffs, was a gift worthy of a god child, while the common Egyptian incense ingredient pistachio resin was barely mentioned in contemporary recipes.
Maybe it’s a sign of our own times’ strange newness that, politically speaking, many of us are clinging so single-mindedly to the past — or are at least ripe pickings for present-day Professor Marvels with meaner spirits and unspecific promises of a return to former glory and safety. But I still believe that the shine of the unusual trumps fear most of the time. Just because there are a lot of unfamiliar customs around nowadays, be they cuisines, family styles or gender identities, doesn’t make human curiosity any less of a potent push outward.
